28 years ago, Pep Tosar began a line of creations revolving around poets with that fantastic La casa en obres in which he approached the life and work of the Majorcan Blai Bonet, and which the Teatre del Raval will precisely revive in December to commemorate the hundred years since his birth. Since then, Tosar has walked his imagination through the biography and work of Damià Huguet (Esquena de gabinet) –to whom he has dedicated the small hall of the theatre–, of Guillem d’Efak (Tots aquests dois), of Fernando Pessoa (El fingidor) and of Federico García Lorca with the show Federico García, premiered in 2015 at the Teatre Romea and revived with the inauguration of the new Teatre del Raval.

Catalan farmhouses and ancestral homes are the memory of a time and a country. They are the memory of a society, a way of living, of loving, of working and, consequently, the memory of those who lived and, all too often, died there. The memory of a peasantry.

Suicides often leave farewell letters that can explain the reasons for such a drastic decision. Writers of the stature of Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, Cesare Pavese, and the much less known Henri Roorda, author of the work that Mario Gas presents at the Sala Beckett, did so.

Theater usually tells stories, but there is theater that also asks questions, that demands the spectator to define themselves in front of what they are seeing or have just seen. This is the case of Don't look, the new production by the performing arts and audiovisual collective Cultura i Conflicte. Once the performance is over, spectators can access a cubicle installed in the lobby of the Gothic hall of the Biblioteca de Catalunya and answer the questions that have emerged throughout the proposal. Would you continue to love your father if you found out he had been a torturer and murderer? Would you tolerate someone's torture to save your child?

The premiere of La belle Hélène at the Teatre Lliure directed by Pere Planella in 1979 constituted the first great popular success for the company that had opened the Gràcia theatre three years earlier with Camí de nit. Miquel Mas Fiol's proposal which commemorates the fifty years of the Lliure moves away from Offenbach's operetta to build a heartfelt and quite entertaining tribute to the founders and their way of working and living theatre.

Tradition says that the essence of theatre lies in a stage with a performer and a chair. Nothing else is needed. An idea that, if there is a Barcelona theatre that explores it, it is Àlex Rigola's Heartbreak Hotel, which makes a virtue of scenic minimalism. It returns now with the magnificent theatrical game that Sergi Belbel wrote some years ago and which won two awards (Ciutat de València 2022 and Critics' Award of Valencian writers) but which had never been premiered: She and Machine. An actress and an actor and a chair embraced by the splendid lighting of Kiko Planas in an empty space.

All Cirque du Soleil shows are similar, but some have something that makes them special. Kurios. Cabinet of Curiosities is one of them. An imaginative show like a story without a plot, populated by very surprising and curious characters, such as the accordion man, the bathyscaphe man, the machine man, the robot insects, and the inventor scientist with airs of the Franz of Copenhagen from TBO. A fantasy with magical touches that invites you to enter this scientist's laboratory and discover that, like E.T., you can fly on a bicycle, even upside down (as the French acrobat Anne Weissbecker does); that you can see an invisible lion, or you can cheer on the non-existent tightrope walker Giuseppe so he jumps from the trapeze into the water basin in the Invisible Circus of the fantastic Argentine clown Facundo Giménez, who in the second act offers a very funny animal mime act.

A good story and a great performer. Nothing else is needed to achieve a great theater performance. In this case, it is the story of the childhood and adolescence of the actor, director, and writer Fernando Fernán Gómez, adapted by the man who was his friend and collaborator for years, José Sacristán. A Sacristán who, it must be said, at 88 years old fills the theater with a clear diction full of nuances that can be heard perfectly until the very last row. It is a sincere and heartfelt tribute to his friend by a Sacristán who, at this stage of the journey that is life, has made the theater a territory of reality and pleasure. A Sacristán who does not need great scenography or theatrical machinery. A chair and a cushion (which he says was his grandmother's), a kind of trunk, a lamp, and the fall of a piece of curtain evoke a space of creation and life.

The classics speak to us of today and of ourselves. They speak to us of human relationships, of politics, of power, of who we are, how we are, and how we relate to each other. An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen and its protagonist, Thomas Stockman, are a clear example. 144 years after its publication, the play maintains a fierce relevance tied, of course, to the political dilemmas it poses. And even more so: it is also tied to Brazil, where director Christiane Jatahy sets the play, and to the fidelity to scientific truth defended by Doctor Thomas Stockman, even if it implies the ruin of the community, or the renunciation to preserve the economic interests of society.

Venezuela is the paradigm of theoretically rich South American states subjected to historical political disjunctions between left-wing spaces, which, wrapped in the flags of revolution, promise and do not deliver, and right-wing spaces abducted by the rules of maximum profit that promise and also do not deliver, between the defense of identity —they call it patriotism— and selling to the highest bidder. Today's Venezuela is Venezuela between, on the one hand, the inoperable and incapable Chavista dictatorship sold to the American mafia by the executors of the utopia and, on the other hand, the siren songs of an opposition led by a candidate who trusted the same gang mafioso that doesn't even let her return to her country.

Roland Schimmelpfennig is one of the most performed German authors in the world, and his work has begun to emerge among us since the premiere of The Arabian Night (2006) at the Sala Beckett under the direction of Toni Casares. His theatre shuns conventional dramatic conventions and, consequently, explores new ways of explaining reality. He does so through a play of social and personal tensions within a hyper-fragmented and repetitive narrative, which illustrates very well the accelerated, nervous, almost convulsive nature of today's society. All of this is seasoned with corrosive humour. They are always demanding works for the performers but also for the spectators, confronted with a stage development where the information, scarce but sufficient, is admirably mixed with an often stark poetic lyricism where the characters elude logic.

The worship of beauty and narcissistic vanity are now very present in society through the world of social networks. You are as you are seen. And you must always be seen well. It's not about making a pact with the devil to preserve youth, but with personal trainers and cosmetic shops to groom yourself.

Tall, agile, well-built, attractive, furious, violent, histrionic, clownish. And without a hump. This is Shakespeare's Richard III as imagined by Calixto Bieito, which has been at the Grec Festival in a 2025 production by Buenos Aires' Teatro San Martín, starring actor Joaquín Furriel, whom Calixto Bieito had already directed in 2010 in a version of "Life is a dream of Calderón de la Barca.

It is easy to imagine the surprise of the playwright and director Lucía Carballal (Les Bàrbares, Los nuestros) when the National Classical Theatre Company (CNTC) commissioned her to write a text that would dialogue with the little-known work of Calderón de la Barca El Castillo de Lindabridis. It is a fantastic comedy in which a princess travels with a flying castle in search of a husband who will make her queen after her father's death. We must celebrate Carballal's talent and skill in this powerful and brilliant exercise of autofiction that speaks of helplessness and of inheritance, both emotional and physical, both material and immaterial.

Newton's first law is the scientific statement of the immobility of an object if there is no force pushing it. It happens with objects and also with our lives and with politics, because if there is no one pushing for real changes, things stay as they are.

All festivals are creative and playful spaces where very diverse proposals coincide that are difficult to see in the regular seasons of theaters. Differences that not only have to do with their artistic quality, but with the objective, with the capacity to produce emotions, to reflect ourselves and the society in which we live or even simply to entertain us, but also with the means of production to bring them to life and which often reflect other cultural and economic differences. It was only two days ago that the Fabià Puigserver hall of the Teatre Lliure received Florentina Holzinger, one of the stars of European radicality, with a show (Ophelia’s got talent) in which nothing was spared and where even a life-size helicopter appeared. And three days later in the small Espai Lliure a Mexican company brought us a simple but committed political view on the perversion of the capitalist system in Mexico, extensible throughout depressed societies in the line of what the writer and journalist Eduardo Galeano analyzed and denounced in Las venas abiertas de América Latina.My mother and money raises the difficulty, or almost the impossibility, for the lower classes outside the privileged West to access a dignified life, despite working tirelessly. This is the real case of Josefina Orlaineta, mother of actor and playwright Anacarsis Ramos. Why, at 66 years old and having worked all her life, does my mother live in poverty?, Ramos asks himself. And that's why he convinced her to explain her life experience with work and money. So, the enterprising Josefina added acting to her work history with more than forty commercial initiatives. And what ease she displays! As if she had been doing it all her life.

Romeo Castellucci is interested in the construction of the image and its manipulation with a strong aesthetic and often political component. An imaginary where the most theatrical fits, as we have seen in Bros (Temporada Alta) and the trilogy on the Divine Comedy by Dante and On the Concept of Face, in the Son of God (Festival Grec), but also in performative installations such as Il terzo Reich (Temporada Alta) or this Believing in Masks. The Italian artist creates a sequence of objects that enter and leave the pristine white space of the museum-like air of the Raval room of the CCCB, surrounded by spectators masked with different human masks. They are objects of a certain quotidian nature (a glass of milk, a bouquet of flowers, a jug, a photograph of Stan Laurel, a crucifix...) which he names with names that have nothing to do with them, exhibiting an impossible logic, since the series is designed for the final appearance of an electric chair like those used in the executions of condemned to death and which, now yes, is called by its name: chair. A chair very similar to Andy Warhol's famous screen print that may or may not provoke the reaction of the attendees. From mere observation to its use and finally its figurative destruction. Forty minutes of a visual poem very typical of contemporary art.

The title of the new proposal by Oriol Puig Grau, author of the celebrated Karaoke Elusia, I told the mystery behind the tarot cards. Specifically, this mystery refers to the Tower card, which is generally interpreted as divine wrath announcing catastrophe, chaos, and ruin. However, it can also have a positive meaning: to stir the person to get them out of their comfort zone and confront them with the world. The sixteenth number of the major arcana rises from the first interpretation. Oriol Puig Grau's work poses a kind of journalistic investigation into the history of an isolated house, struck by lightning. In the building, located on the outskirts of a town, youth used to raves, and it was inhabited by a mysterious Russian woman.

Florentina Holzinger is one of the most daring voices in European theatre with proposals that, given what we've seen in this Ophelia’s got talent, show influences of the radical theatre of La Fura dels Baus from a few years ago and parallels with the work of Angélica Liddell or the Brazilian Carolina Bianchi. But, in my opinion, they evoke, due to their content and dramaturgy, or rather their absence, the so-called American vaudeville theatre of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, conveniently updated. A very popular entertainment in which, one after another, musical numbers, dance, acrobatics, fakirism, illusionism, humour, with audience participation, and even biological oddities introduced by a presenter are presented. These kinds of shows were adapted for television after the Second World War.

The strategy of using a well-known title as a hook in proposals centered around popular works is legitimate, but in the case of this A Midsummer Night's Dream I believe it is, above all, an act of honesty and recognition that Àlex Rigola's dramaturgy is indebted to Shakespeare's genius and Salvador Oliva's excellent translation, even though very little remains of both. Little, but fundamental. Because what Rigola has imagined is a dynamic, jovial, daring, and at the same time, very delicate performance about love, one of the themes – perhaps the main one – of the great bard's fairy comedy.